Thursday, January 2, 2014

Is a Live Help feature necessary for your website?

In today’s tech savvy world, the Internet is a godsend for many people. They log on to make purchases, payments, do business, and even take classes. And since nothing is infallible, customer support is needed for all aspects of online transactions.

So, let’s say that you have a state of the art call center that will allow customers to call in to get help with their online transactions. Most customers want instant gratification, so talking to someone right away while they are in the throes of panic is important to them – although the panic is often self-induced and unfounded. However needy they are, your business (and potential future business) depends upon their happiness. Now, let’s say that your call center has ten support specialists and they are all on the phone, so your eleventh panic stricken customer is on hold (or worse yet – getting a busy signal) and all the time cursing your existence.

However what if you had a simple little feature on your web site that says “Live Help?” What if clicking that button put your customer into an instant queue and told them that a customer service representative would be right with them? No hold queue, no busy signal – just a pop-up window that says “You are important to us” and “Someone will be right with you.” Live Help is quickly replacing support call centers.

The benefits of Live Help for online businesses far outweigh the costs associated with it. For one, if you use Live Help instead of toll-free telephone lines, you can save the costs of those special lines and for each call that comes in. You already have the cost of computers and Internet obviously because of your online business, so saving a few extra dollars is a good thing.

Live Help is also beneficial for sales. What is a potential customer has a question about a product? Wouldn’t it be nice if they could ask it on the spot – like they would in a brick-and-mortar store – and be convinced that it’s a good purchase? Unanswered questions tend to drive consumers to other places where they CAN get answers immediately.

Live Help has been known to increase the trust of visitors, if they can get information on the spot. These visitors can become customers and their satisfaction and loyalty can be increased by offering this service. And if they are happy, they can spread the word to other potential customers.

Live Help is an easy program to install and maintain and would be worth the investment for future business successes. It operates much like an instant messaging program, which a majority of computer users are already familiar with and comfortable using.

In addition to all of the benefits listed here, Live Help shows your customers (and visitors) that you are up-to-date with technological advances and that you care about your customers enough to give them the instant gratification that they need in order to continue their shopping, business work, studies, and research.

Site Promotion via Social Bookmarking and Networking

If you have been trying to get traffic to your site without paying for it, you must know by now that participating in online communities is one of the best ways. There are many different types of online communities that you can join and most will help you get a certain amount of traffic to your site. For this article, I will focus on only three types. Most commonly, new webmasters try to promote their website by subscribing to an online forum or a news site such as Slashdot or Digg. In addition, there are two other overlooked communities that can help you drive lots of traffic to your website and that includes social search engines and social bookmarking sites.

When it comes to using an online forum or news site as part of your marketing campaign it is important that you remember the most essential rule and that is, do not spam. Make sure that you are actively participating in the discussion and that you are not there just to promote your website. Many of these forums such as Slashdot and Digg use a moderation system that allows other users to give your posting such a low score that the vast majority of people will never see it. This is what will happen to you if you spam the forum other than of course getting banned all together. If you ad meaningful comments to a discussion, other users will become interested in what else you have to say and they will visit your website either via your signature or your profile.

In addition, social search engines have, recently, been gaining popularity. The internet consists of billions of websites and dishonest webmasters have been busy keyword optimizing their sites just to profit from Adsense. It has become very difficult for surfers to find the most relevant sites to their queries. Even Google’s results even though the best compared to other search engines often are not the most relevant. In an effort to avoid this clutter, web users are coming together in social search engines to create a searchable collection of websites with useful content. If you are a webmaster and you want to promote your content rich site and your search engine optimization is not working then you might want to consider submitting your website to one of these social search engines.

Finally, social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us are becoming very popular and you can definitely use them to promote your site. In social bookmarking, you store links to your favorite websites online so you can access them from any computer that you are using. Most importantly, you can make your collection of links public so that others can also use them. In addition, you specify a set of tags for each link that you submit. You and other web surfers can use these tags to search for links of similar interest to their own. This is how you can promote your site. Simply bookmark your site and tag it with the most relevant keywords. Then, when other people search using these keywords, your site will come up and they might pay you a visit. If people enjoy your website, they might bookmark it themselves increasing the chances that others will come across it.

Interested in Increasing Your Google Pagerank?

You should be. If you have never heard of Google PageRank and you have established a website, it is high time you learned about Google PageRank and what it means to you and the success of your website. Having an excellent Google PageRank can either make or break a website in terms of overall success. Let’s take a look at what Google PageRank is and why it is so important to every website owner.

First, a word about the Google Search engine: Google is one of the most popular search engines on the Internet. Not only is Google’s search engine the absolute largest of its kind, the company focuses on making web information easy to access and even easier to find. Google has designed a unique system and the search engine has yet to be surpassed in terms of the information it provides. Google has grown immensely since its early beginning in 1996 and it will continue to be a predominant force on the Internet. Furthermore, because Google offers easy access to immediate information, they own one of the top Internet search engines in the world. Thus, it would serve a webmaster well to become familiar with the Google PageRank process-the Google PageRank is an algorithm that is based on inbound links and other factors and will ultimately determine the location of listing of your website in the Google Search Engine.

What precisely is Google PageRank?


Google PageRank is a process the search engine’s uses as a way of selecting sites to answer specific queries. Basically, when an Internet user submits a query, the Google search engine will attempt to match websites to the query that has been posed. Yet, there is a bit more to this simple science than the act of submitting a query suggests. Rather, behind the scenes, Google uses specific algorithms to determine if a site specifically address a web user’s needs by analyzing the content of a site by keyword and by the number of inbound links associated with the site-every inbound link is viewed as a vote and the more votes one has, in conjunction with the more keywords one has, the higher their Google PageRank is.

Why is Your Google PageRank Significant?


What does it mean to you when your Google PageRank is increased? Does it really matter what your Google PageRank is at all? You bet it does-the higher your Google PageRank is the higher on a search engine’s listing your website will appear. Thus, if you are looking for top billing, especially in a search engine as popular as the one Google offers, you will definitely want to maximize your efforts of getting your website visible and improving your PageRank is the best way to accomplish such a task. Moreover, the higher you appear on the search engine listing offered by Google, or many other search engines, the easier your website is to find. Essentially this equates to more web traffic for your website and if you are running an online business, more web traffic ultimately means more profit for you.

 

Making Google PageRank Improvements


If you are looking to improve your Google PageRank you can do so by starting a link campaign. A link campaign can help you increase more inbound links to your website and in turn, more inbound links will increase your Google PageRank. How do you start a link campaign? Well, you can go the hard route by scouring the Internet to find websites similar to your own. Or, you can make your link campaign a far easier process by using the services afforded to you by PageRank Browser and locate all of the best, themed websites on the Internet with relative ease.

Of course, there are few things you must bear in mind when you begin your link campaign. Google actually rates various links and holds some links higher than others. In other words, if you link to 100 less than popular sites you may increase your Google PageRank. Conversely, if you link to 50 extremely popular sites and you get inbound links in return, you may significantly increase your Google PageRank because the most popular sites on the Internet are linking directly too you. Thus, when you begin your link campaign, keep this popularity issue in the back of your mind. Further, know that in using PageRank Browser, you will be able to locate the popular sites with ease, and thereby significantly increase your Google PageRank.

About Inbound Links


Quite frankly, some links that you will establish will be better than others. You goal will be to establish the best links possible by examining the quality of inbound links. Various webmaster tools can help you determine the quality of the reciprocal links you establish. You will want to work hard at establishing direct inbound links to your site-direct links from already popular websites. You will also need to establish links to websites that are similar to yours-remember the search engine algorithm used by Google to determine your page rank is based on relevance. You will also find that the location of inbound links is of significant importance. For example, when you establish inbound links, those links that are buried deep within a website will have less influence on the ranking of your website in Google’s search engine.

What is clear is that your Google PageRank is of significant importance. Thus, every effort should be used to improve your Google PageRank-with the use of webmaster tools and the use of sites like PageRank Browser you should have little difficulty getting your PageRank right where it should be. Therefore, you will not only improve your PageRank you will improve the web traffic you receive by leaps and bounds. Moreover, your improved PageRank will make you a force on the Internet to be reckoned with-you will have a highly recognizable website for all your efforts and you will ultimately improve your online business’ bottom line.